From Landmass to Ocean: Conversations with Sinthujan Varatharajah

As part of the Chennai Photo Biennale’s series of conversations reflecting on practices of representation, Suchitra Vijayan spoke to the Berlin-based political geographer and researcher, Sinthujan Varatharajah on 15 April 2021. The conversation flowed across the specific nature of their projects—broadly, on visualising zones of political distinction—to settle into a space where dialogue could take place, difficult questions tackled and personal methods held up for scrutiny. Varatharajah emphasised the centrality of their own Eelam Tamil experience in their work. Having been brought into Germany in their childhood as a refugee—with their parents escaping the ethnic cleansing in Sri Lanka during the late 1980s—the exiled, Eelam Tamil community remains the first, imagined audience for all of Varatharajah’s work.

Traumatic histories of violently dislocated communities produce fault lines that get enjoined to the public memories of host countries—much as the diverse refugee populations would have confronted the momentous upheavals of Germany on the verge of the collapse of the Berlin Wall. This informed one of Varatharajah’s artistic projects too—where they used the maps of Berlin to recreate the lines of movement that were adopted by Eelam Tamil refugees negotiating the space of Berlin in the late ’80s. This translates as an act of reclamation—whereby the city of Berlin becomes reconstituted by the imaginative investments of the Eelam Tamil populations that have passed through it.

Varatharajah discussed how images, texts and objects—digitally produced or otherwise—occupy the multiple ways in which such repressed histories of reclamation can be recreated and given new modes of visibility. The exilic diaspora is condemned to return to Eelam only through acts of imaginative and virtual arrival. Negotiating the difficult, increasingly censured spaces online—and helping others do so—is another important facet of their political activist work. Varatharajah's work rejects the visual regimes constructed by the restrictive, legally and spatially bound, inter-sectional gazes of white Europe, nationalist India and (majoritarian, Sinhalese) Sri Lanka that seeks to overwhelm the subordinate links between two Tamil communities separated by an unruly strip of water. Varatharajah almost attributes this fluvial, oceanic border zone as a utopic space on which a possible map of belonging for the Eelam Tamil communities across the world can be drawn. Unpicking the “curated invisibilities” that afflict the fates of refugee populations across the world linked by their common traumatic experiences—whether Tamil, Palestinian or Ghanian—remains a guiding principle for the artistic and research methods chosen by Varatharajah.         

Varatharajah later spoke to Ankan Kazi to burrow deeper into some of the themes raised by their conversation with Suchitra Vijayan.

Ankan Kazi (AK): The concept of oceanic borders that you discussed was very fascinating. Especially for exilic communities from island states: one gets the sense of being surrounded by a world of fluvial, shifting, subtle, but clear zones of distinction. How do you visualise these conceptual movements while working with online spaces—do critical acts of “surfing” help change the terms of what becomes visible outside the nationalist gaze of, say, India and Sri Lanka?

Sinthujan Varatharajah (SV): In my work I try to uncentre land: mentally, emotionally, rhetorically but also visually. I try to reframe, redraw and tear apart maps, to draw attention to how we privilege land over water; to how we measure distance not by matter (of) how far a place is, but by matter of how nation states have drawn boundaries and built infrastructure to reinforce these boundaries, proximities and distances. Through my work, I want to understand what it means to look at each from different shores of the same ocean, to not think of us as people of a landmass, but people of a sea. I try to enquire how that conceptual difference helps us understand our place in this world better; how to envision a future which allows (one) to exist differently than today.

AK: Considering the multiple media you use for your work—how do photographs feature in your scheme of things? Do they serve any specific associations with your memories of exile or in the shaping of identity? Do you use only personal photographs or do you find/ source them from Eelam Tamil refugee communities? Since they are always the first imagined audience for all your work, what kind of ethical considerations enter your practice of using personal images for public exhibits? 

SV: I use photographs in my work as a form of documentation and testimony. In the context of a mass displacement, material manifestations of a past are often the first to be lost. This rupture—this lack of visual memories—has a toll on people's sense of self and their personal as well as collective histories. Therefore, I use a lot of personal photographs—old ones and new ones—to counter the absence of such material memories, create a new visual language and landscape and therefore stabilise the sense of exiled, displaced-self. I also tried to create a digital archive of portrait photos taken in Eelam by tapping into Eelam Tamil community networks. I have used some of these in my work. However, over time, I shifted to using more abstract photos and imageries to narrate stories of exile, moving away from bodies to landscapes and built structures. Using people's photos, displaying their bodies requires a lot of ethical considerations, particularly in the context of criminalised histories. Consent is, of course, paramount here. But how do you, for instance, receive consent from the dead? You are eventually forced to ask for consent from close relatives. But even then, you are left to ponder whether that is adequate. I often end up blurring faces or using single body parts to abstract from a particular person.

All images courtesy of Sinthujan Varatharajah.

To read about the previous conversations in this series, please click here.